Brutal Intimacy

Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema

Tim Palmer

Publication Year: 2011

Brutal Intimacy is the first book to explore the fascinating films of contemporary France, ranging from mainstream genre spectaculars to arthouse experiments, and from wildly popular hits to films that deliberately alienate the viewer. Twenty-first-century France is a major source of international cinema—diverse and dynamic, embattled yet prosperous—a national cinema offering something for everyone. Tim Palmer investigates France’s growing population of women filmmakers, its buoyant vanguard of first-time filmmakers, the rise of the controversial cinema du corps, and France’s cinema icons: auteurs like Olivier Assayas, Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont, Gaspar Noé, and stars such as Vincent Cassel and Jean Dujardin. Analyzing dozens of breakthrough films, Brutal Intimacy situates infamous titles alongside many yet to be studied in the English language. Drawing on interviews and the testimony of leading film artists, Brutal Intimacy promises to be an influential treatment of French cinema today, its evolving rivalry with Hollywood, and its ambitious pursuits of audiences in Europe, North America, and around the world.

Cover

Contents

Acknowledgments

As I was writing this book, many people cleared my path and helped me find
my way. Thank you first of all to the people who agreed to be interviewed, for
giving up their time so generously. I am especially grateful to Marina de Van,
Lola Doillon, and Julie Lopes-Curval. Thanks to Matthieu-David Cournot for
our conversations in person and via...

Introduction: The Contemporary French Film Ecosystem

The December 2007 European edition of Time
magazine, prompted by Marcel Marceau’s death
that September, used for its cover a sorrowful mime
staring tearfully at the ground. The accompanying headline proclaimed:
“The Death of French Culture.” Unsurprisingly, in the light of recent Franco-
American relations, this incident quickly...

Chapter One: 5 x 1 Young Cinema and First-Timers

Among critics and filmmakers, the expression le
jeune cinéma français is often used to refer to any
striking or especially creative surge in contemporary
French filmmaking. It translates literally as
young French cinema, a useful way of considering
what Réné Prédal calls the film industry’s “incessant
renewal,”1 its velocity and forward momentum.
Young cinema: the term suggests...

Chapter Two: The Cin

As an art form and a professional practice, cinema
thrives on its ability to induce vivid sensations—a
tendency that some readily take to extremes. Yet
while the majority of world film engages its viewers
to convey satisfaction or gratification, an opposite
tendency occasionally emerges, abrasive forms of
cinema that seek more confrontational experiences.
In this context we can start to...

Chapter Three: Popular Cinema, Pop-Art Cinema

Most accounts of recent French cinema gloss over
or disparage its popular sector;1 they also assume
that the mainstream is completely disconnected
from the more artistically respectable, hence widely studied, realms of auteur
filmmaking. This chapter engages with these inherited notions, disputing
both. In the first place, of course, France’s film mainstream is the fulcrum of
its industry’s battle to retain its domestic market share, combating...

Chapter Four: Feminine Cinema

Concerning the rights of its female citizens, France
has often lagged behind its Western neighbors.
Reflecting this, a catalog of France’s belated efforts
to enfranchise women is usually cited by both
Anglo-
American and French feminists. There was
the so-called “first wave” of feminist intervention,
symbolized by the 1949 publication of Simone de
Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, coinciding with women
finally getting the right to vote in 1944, then having
their equal status with men written...

Conclusion: Instructive Cinephilia: Film Literacy and la F

This book’s interrelated strands, our conceptual
survey of contemporary French cinema, reveal a
cluster of textual and professional issues. Central
among these, this conclusion iterates, is France’s
abiding cinephilia, a passion for film in all its forms.
This contemporary cinephilia exists, though, not
only as a staple of French critical reception, the traditional
model, but also emerges...

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